1. Field of the Invention
One or more embodiments of the invention generally relate to memory, and in particular to non-volatile solid-state memory.
2. Description of the Related Art
Flash memory is a quickly growing industry. Example applications include PDAs, laptop computers, digital audio players, digital cameras, cell phones, and video game consoles. Flash memory has certain advantages over other types of memories. For example, flash memories have fast read access times, good durability, strong kinetic shock resistance, a wide temperature range, good resistance to pressure and water, and requires no power to retain information. As a result of these performance characteristics, flash memories are very popular in portable devices.
However, flash memories have performance limitations as well. For example, the endurance (for example, lifetime) of a flash memory is limited to a finite number of erase-write cycles. In addition, flash memory has better reliability when data is programmed in a block of single-level cells (SLC) (that is, cells programmed and/or erased to one of two states), compared to when data is programmed as a block of multi-level cells (MLC) having two or more levels (that is, bits) per cell.